Virtually all commercial and military industries are dependent on integrated processors, computing, and the electronic components associated therewith to carry out their businesses and missions. It is well known that these electronic components, when they are energized and consuming power, produce heat that in most instances must be actively removed by means other than simple radiation-dissipation to the surrounding environment. To accomplish this heat removal, many industrial and military applications use fans and/or blowers to convectively remove the heat produced by energy consuming electronic components.
To be most effective, these fans are normally mounted onto the chassis, housing, enclosure or platform that contains the electronic components. Mounting the fans in this manner however can create low level noise problems, since the vibration or structure-borne noise generated by the operating fans may be transmitted to the electronic components, the platform for the electronic components, and the surrounding environment.
In some applications, such as military submarine platforms in which stealth is required, it is critical to limit low level noise. Indeed, military standards such as MIL-STD 740-2 detail the measurement and limits of structure-borne low level vibratory noise. One way to limit such noise is to slow down the speed of the fans used to cool the electronic components, or to deactivate one or more of those fans.
The cooling of electronic components and the reduction of low level structure-borne noise are, on most if not all platforms, competing critical parameters. They are critical because an elevated temperature within an electronic enclosure may lead to failure of electronic components, and elevated structure-borne noise may lead to a military vehicle such as a submarine becoming detectable by hostile forces. They are competing because to attain or maintain a lower temperature, more fans must be run at greater speeds. However, operating more fans at greater speeds will increase the low level noise associated with the enclosure. Despite the dynamics and interrelatedness between temperature control and noise control, prior art systems are single point solutions—i.e. they address either temperature or noise independently, but not the effect of one on the other. Consequently, the art is in need of a system that can simultaneously and logically control both convective cooling and low level noise reduction so that the two competing interests can be simultaneously addressed.